FO Newsletter – 01 September 2016

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Each Friday, I send out the Executive Intelligence Summary – it’s an intelligence report from the perspective of emergency preparedness and community security.

I spend about 20 hours a week reading everything from US government reports to foreign media, military developments, economic data, and news about emerging threats, to spend about 10 hours analyzing trends and writing the report. (The remaining 10-20 hours is spent on writing how-to articles, answering emails/questions, and developing a new project that you’re probably going to love. More on that in the future…)

But if you’re like me, then you’ve never been more concerned about the future. And that’s exactly why I’ve been writing a series of articles entitled: SHTF Intelligence – Getting Started.

Intelligence gathering on a local level is critically important to your security. I recommend a 60/30/10 split — 60% of your intel time should focus on the local level, 30% at the county/state level, and 10% on the national level.

Why?

Because in the beginning of an emergency, we should care a lot less about the cause of the SHTF scenario and a lot more about how it’s going to affect us.

If the power goes out or there’s a financial meltdown, I’m simply not going to give much thought about what caused it. What I really care about is:

what are the consequences; and

how is it going to affect my family and my community?

What we should really be paying attention to are the second- and third-order effects of the SHTF event. And that’s a problem that only intelligence can solve!

So first things first… I want to get a leg up on the competition, which means I need timely and accurate information.

First, we need to get eyes on our home and surrounding area. The greatest contributor to our survivability is seeing a threat before it sees us.

Second, we need to get our ‘ears’ on — police scanners up and software defined radio searching for local radio transmissions.

And third, we need to organize our neighbors to help us collect information. Every set of eyes and ears in the community is collecting information, and they may as well be passing up the significant stuff to us.

Want to get the Forward Observer Newsletter each week by email? It’s free and you’ll get information on intelligence, security, and defense. Just sign up here. (Spam policy: we won’t share or sell your email. It’s just between us, and you can easily opt-out.)